Word: legalism
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Anemic Case. From then on the controversy swirled off into a storm of legal maneuvers, press conferences and telegrams (the National Guardsmen got so bored doing nothing that they finally turned to threatening Northern newsmen with arrest for "inciting to violence," i.e., reporting the story). Orval Faubus fired off a wild-eyed message to the President of the U.S.: he thought his telephone lines were being tapped: he was sure that Federal authorities were plotting to arrest him; the situation in Little Rock "grows more explosive by the hour." To ward off all invaders, Orval Faubus de ployed his militia...
...while, hard-bitten little Judge Davies was steering a carefully legal course and refusing to back water by so much as an inch. Clearing the way for possible future Government action against Faubus (see The Law), Davies ordered U.S. enforcement agencies to start collecting the facts behind Faubus' defiance. At a weekend hearing Davies flicked aside a new petition for delay by the Little Rock school authorities. Said he, coldly: "The testimony and arguments this morning were, in my judgment, as anemic as the petition itself ... In an organized society there can be nothing but ultimate confusion and chaos...
...legal precedents that apply to Orval Faubus v. the U.S. reach all the way back to a September night during the Revolutionary War when a Connecticut fisherman named Gideon Olmstead, two seamen and a boy, imprisoned aboard the British sloop Active, rose up and overpowered 14 British sailormen and captured the ship for the 13 states. Couple of days later the heroes were themselves chased, caught and captured, not by the British but by the armed brig Convention, in the service of Pennsylvania. They were hauled into the port of Philadelphia, where the admiralty court ordered the vessel sold...
Arkansas' Governor Faubus appears to have gone even farther than Pennsylvania's embattled Governor Snyder in that he appears, personally, to be creating conditions in which he might violate the law. By disposing state militiamen around his mansion to prevent serving of a legal processor warrant, he will be liable (if such a warrant is issued) to punishment of a fine not exceeding $300 and/or one year's imprisonment...
Anywhere along this long legal line Faubus could withdraw, by calling off the state guardsmen and letting integration proceed. In this event President Eisenhower, like Madison, would not be likely to instigate reprisals against the governor. But the U.S. is nonetheless determined to move through the courts, slowly, deliberately, sensibly, to win the battle and safeguard the Constitution. This was the determination, in the spirit of Marshall and Madison, that underlay the cold message sent to Orval Faubus last week by President Eisenhower...